Assuming JNC is doing a 2026 contest soon, I would like to submit this year to the Ongoing Series category.
I've written 5 completely ready to go volumes and have a 6th close to 90% done, along with a detailed and completed series Bible.
I was hoping I could find some people to read and critique my first volume over the next month so I can have the strongest entry possible for whenever the submission portal opens up.
It's a multi-genre piece. The first volume explores how warlocks who have built a mundane life in a realistic setting to protect their family from a dangerous hidden realm learn to love, accept, and sometimes protect those within their community when they hide dangerous secrets and flaws of their own. How do their old ways begin to intersect with their cover life when ordinary life holds its own dangers? Its slice of life meets dark urban fantasy, held together by a family saga structure. I often describe what I'm going for as what happens when you drop a grimoire into Violet Evergarden, except your cast is something closer to A Silent Voice. Tonally the arcs range from Erased to Frieren to My Clueless First Friend in vol 1 — as the series open up it is a bit more like Frieren meets Fragrant Flower, but with a speculative framework that turns Earth as we know it into a type of Isekai.
Here is the basic synopsis:
The Genji family opens the series navigating a crisis in their community concerning their six-year-old son Jomei's newest friend, Soshi, that can only be resolved when the clandestine magical intervention staged by Jomei's parents, Chimon and Kumiko, rescues multiple people from an escalating cycle of domestic abuse. The presence of magic in this quiet, coastal Japanese town remains bubbling beneath the surface, a well-kept secret to all except the two of them — even unbeknownst to Jomei — until the story advances to Jomei's final year of middle school. What occurs then could either be described as an act of disobedience, or as destiny – depending on who you ask!
When the popular fourteen-year-old Jomei intervenes to defend transfer student Hibiki Kurosawa — a nonspeaking, neurodivergent boy whose intellect and depth of feeling most people never take the time to discover — from bullying, the two forge an unlikely friendship that changes both their lives. Together they stumble into a hidden occult archive within the Genji family library, and Jomei discovers that his family's quiet life was never the whole truth. His parents aren't ordinary people. They're warlocks in hiding.
What will happen when two teens suddenly become aware of magic existing within their world? And more importantly, who will be watching them as a result?
CONTENT WARNINGS: Domestic/Child abuse, Language, Graphic Violence (Rare), Occult
Anyone willing to help out? If so, are we able to exchange emails?
